This invention relates to online transactions, and more particularly, to ways to help secure sensitive data during online transactions.
Online transactions such as purchase transactions often require that entities such as merchants and payment card processors exchange sensitive information. For example, in connection with a typical purchase by a customer, a merchant often obtains the primary account number (PAN) corresponding to the payment card account of a customer (e.g., the customer's credit card number). The merchant then provides the PAN to a payment card processor (payment processor) as part of an authorization request. The payment processor then uses a tokenization server to obtain a corresponding token from a central database that is provided to the merchant if the purchase is authorized.
Later, when settling the purchase transaction, the merchant may submit the token and the settlement amount to the payment processor. The payment processor may recover the PAN of the customer from the token using the central database.
In this type of transaction, regional tokenization servers typically process purchase transactions with merchants in a given geographical region. Regional tokenization servers typically request the token corresponding to the provided PAN from a common central database. If no token corresponding token exists in the common central database at the time of the request, a new token is generated and an entry is added to the common central database.
Purchase transactions originating with merchants around the world are therefore dependent on global communications systems to provide access to the common database. This can be problematic if any portion of a global communications system becomes temporarily unavailable or inoperable.
In some situations, regional tokenization servers can generate partially tokenized sensitive data at a tokenization server based on one or more previously provided token look-up tables without relying on constant connection to a global communications network. However, these systems typically tokenize only a portion of the sensitive data due to data storage and processing considerations.
It would therefore be desirable to be able to provide improved ways in which to handle sensitive data such as tokens in connection with online transactions.